A Place Built By Poets for Poets

 Jessica Kassiwabara. A Place Built by Poets for Poets. Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2022, p. 15-17.

In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from ope mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn't know of and weren't recieving submissions from these poets. "I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books," says Sims.  That's when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization though which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript and finding a publisher.  In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: they couldn't find poetry books at the library.  "I didn't believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section," says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. 

COMMENT

I've actually been meaning to write an article on how clueless librarians are about collecting poetry.  I'm pretty sure there are librarian poets, but whenever I want a book of poetry, the library never has it and I have to request a purchase.  What seems to baffle librarians is, poetry communities are localized, so that different places have different influential poets.  In order to get their books, you have to buy from small presses.  Instead of supporting poetry, libraries seem to have eliminated subscriptions to literary journals, or they only get a few Big Names and not the local ones that matter.  For people who like to read and write poetry, it's very, very frustrating. 

A Refugee's Story, Through Animation

 Lisa Abend. "A Refugee's Story, Through Animation", New York Times, November 28, 2021, p.AR10.

Rather than relying, as in typical documentary style, on talking heads' descriptions, Rasmussen could put Amin visibly badk in his own '80's Kabul.

Achieving that kind of narrative authenticity required a precise attention to detail, Nicholls said.  Each element in every frame had to be accurate to the time and location: the brand of pot on the stove, the quality of a sunset, even the height of the street curb.  Some of the research was conducted by Rasmussen on scouting trips, but Nichools and her team also spent a lot of time combing archives and libraries.  "Finding pre-Taliban footage of Kabul was really difficult," the said.  "I read a lot of books by Russian spies."

COMMENT

Since libraries tend to collect formally published English language material, the missing information that is not in libraries has charactaristic patterns.   In this instance, a filmmaker is trying to represent Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1980's and found almost no relevant information. Pretty much nobody bothered to document pre-Taliban Kabul, so that it is a place that exists only in inaccurate memories. 

Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.